How Online Reputation Management saved Alaska Airlines’ ass

Jul 7, 2009   //   by Lars Hilse   //   Customer Care, Public Relations, Social Networking  //  View Comments

In my book, “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” I dedicated a chapter to online reputation management.

I stated therein that a single person with enough online influence can ruin your corporate reputation just by posting something on the social web.

It so occurred that companies became aware of that phenomenon and service providers popped up, which monitor the web 24/7 in search for negative news.

But not only service providers are taking care of this vital issues, but many companies try to achieve so themselves as Alaska Airlines proved in a very good way last week on Twitter.

Rainnwilson complains about service of Alaska Airlines on TwitterAn actor boasted out the complaint:

Hey @AlaskaAir you cant just cancel flights & then say, “Sorry”! & not help people get to their destination. Not cool. Fix yr planes, jerks.

complaint about a flight being cancelled which he was apparently booked on.

Note: this exploit was published on June 25th at 19:41 (CET – GMT+2).

Generally this would not have been a problem. But as you can see on the image, this user has an outreach to nearly one million people following him and his updates on the social stream.

Alaska Airlines, who apparently use a tool called CoTweet to intervene to cases like this on the social web, did not even take one minute to reply directly and openly to this complaint.

Alaska Air replies to complaint about their service on Twitter using CoTweetThe consequence of them replying open resulted in their question showing up in context to the users profile so that followers or Wilson were able to monitor the discussion taking place and be impressed by the responsiveness which Alaska Airlines was displaying.

Their reply

@rainnwilson What’s the flight #?

took place online one minute later on June 25th at 19:42 (CET = GMT+2) and led to a discussion which could be followed publicly.

Because of the significant visibility of this user this incident could have easily led to a remarkable decrease of Alaska Air’s reputation.

But since they have done such a remarkle job on monitoring what is being said about them on the social web, especially on Twitter which is one of the largest and most frequented platforms, they were able to prevent worse things from happening.

What do yu think? Is online reputation management something you should dedicate more time to?

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  • http://immeff.ning.com Göran Askeljung

    This is an impressive display of good reputation management on behalf of Alaska Airlines. Obviously they have hired the right people too! For an airline, lika any other highly B2C oriented service industry, RM is crucial in these times. Transparence and Honesty goes hand in hand with it, so accolades to AA for a job well done. I sure would like to see this kind of response from say #Lufthansa also ;-)

  • Mohammed

    An excellent example of saving their reputation. I wish that a lot more companies would be that responsive and listen to their customers.

    Unfortunately that is not the case.

    I can remember several occasions on which I cried for help to customer support and never got an answer.

    Since you mentioned your book, I will definitely buy a copy to see what you have to say.

    Cheers

    M.

  • Christin Arnold

    Lars,

    I truly appreciate for posting such a good example of online reputation management.

    Unfortunately my company does not pay attention at all to this vital topic which might be one of the reasons our operation is tumbling at the moment.

    By the way: I subscribed to your email updates after having read your book. You are pretty responsive yourself, greeting me personally after I signed up. Thank you for that. I was really amazed.

    Make sure to keep up the good work in form of your blog and publications. They are exceptionally good reading and I’ll remain a loyal fan.

    Yours,

    Christin

  • Lisa M.

    I think this is a great post and think a lot of other companies should apply this model of customer service.

  • http://twitter.com/ralphtalmont/status/2513453564 Ralph Talmont

    Cool analysis of the power of Twitter for business by Lars Hilse : http://tr.im/rdOL

  • http://twitter.com/maggiewhy/status/2513619361 Maggie Poore

    RT @ralphtalmont Cool analysis of the power of Twitter for business by Lars Hilse : http://tr.im/rdOL <very very INTERESTING! ta 4 the share

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